March 2012 Archives

No one gets the lingo and the culture of the westward wagon trek like Denver’s Sandra Dallas. Mattie leaves her Midwest home with new husband Luke to create a life homesteading in Colorado. As recorded in her “diary,” she copes with the hardships of frontier life and tries to learn more about her stranger of a husband. One of Linda’s favorite books, this one transports you back in time.

This is a quiet story of Eastern Oregon ranch life at the time of World War I. Nineteen-year-old loner Martha Lessen goes to work training horses for rancher George Bliss and his neighbors. She gets crossways with a hired hand who abuses horses, helps a German family after a wagon accident, and is courted by a persistent Irish cowboy who tests her determination to lead a solitary life.

Dakota rancher Carson Fielding is hired to train horses by land baron Magnus Yarborough and becomes entangled with Yarborough’s much younger wife. In revenge, the wealthy rancher sets out to slowly starve his wife’s horses to death. Fielding teams up with Lakota math whiz Earl Walks Alone and German exchange student Willi Schubert to try to rescue the animals. Meyers weaves Lakota mysticism with tension between ranchers who love their land and those who seek to develop it.

Eleven-year-old Reuben Land narrates this harrowing cross-country journey prompted by his older brother’s murder of a bully. Davy, the brother, becomes a fugitive. The rest of the family—father Jeremiah and Reuben’s younger sister Swede–set out from Minnesota to find him. We chewed our knuckles listening to this book-on-tape during our own drive back to Maryland, as Reuben’s family tracks Davy down, one step ahead of the law.